Well we’ve been doing that (and much more) in Afghanistan without making a dent in the opium supply, why do you think it would work in Mexico?
We’ve done nothing but play political games in warfare over in Afghanistan. When you have to worry about colateral damage, political or otherwise, and forget the prospect of “unleashing hell” to complete and objective, you have already lost the war. This has been proven over and over since Korea.
Those poppy fields and their location are well known. You tell me why they are still producing?
Excellent point.
Destroying the drug cartels is not an impossible task. Two decades ago, Colombia was faced with a similar — and in many ways more daunting — struggle. In the early 1990s, many Colombians, including police officers, judges, presidential candidates, and journalists, were assassinated by the most powerful and fearsome drug-trafficking organizations the world has ever seen: the Cali and Medellín cartels. Yet within a decade, the Colombian government defeated them, with Washington’s help. The United States played a vital role in supporting the Colombian government, and it should do the same for Mexico.
The stakes in Mexico are high. If the cartels win, these criminal enterprises will continue to operate outside the state and the rule of law, undermining Mexico’s democracy. The outcome matters for the United States as well — if the drug cartels succeed, the United States will share a 2,000-mile border with a narcostate controlled by powerful transnational drug cartels that threaten the stability of Central and South America.
THE MEXICAN CONNECTION
Over the last two decades, Mexican drug cartels have acquired unprecedented power to corrupt and intimidate government officials and civilians. Three factors account for their rise: preexisting corruption, the inability of weak law enforcement institutions to counter them, and the demand for illegal drugs in the United States.
Drug trafficking and cross-border smuggling certainly existed in Mexico before the 1980s, but the trade was chiefly confined to marijuana and small quantities of heroin and involved a large number of small trafficking organizations. Almost no cocaine was smuggled through Mexico into the United States before 1984; the vast majority of illegal shipments came through the Bahamas or directly from Colombia to Florida on propeller planes. This changed in the mid-1980s, after the United States shut down the direct flow of cocaine into southern Florida and the Bahamas and made it increasingly difficult to smuggle large amounts of cocaine through the Caribbean. In reaction to Washington’s increasingly successful interdiction strategy, the Colombian cartels forged a connection with major Mexican trafficking organizations. They dispatched a representative to Mexico, Juan Ramón Matta Ballasteros, who came to an agreement with Mexican drug-trafficking organizations in 1984. In exchange for $1,000 per kilogram of cocaine, the Mexican trafficking organizations would smuggle Colombian cocaine into the United States.
Within a few years, 80-90 percent of the cocaine being smuggled into the United States — hundreds of metric tons annually — was moving through Mexico. After the Mexican connection was forged, Colombian propeller planes — with extra fuel tanks and stripped of seats — began landing on remote airstrips in northern Mexico, carrying 600-800 kilos of cocaine per flight. The smuggling business added greatly to the overall revenues of the major Mexican trafficking organizations. As a result, powerful, more consolidated drug cartels began to emerge in Mexico, including the Gulf, Juárez, Sinaloa, and Tijuana cartels.
At first, the Mexican cartels acted primarily as transporters for the Colombian cartels and were paid in cash. But by the early 1990s, the Colombian cartels were paying them in powder cocaine, which led the Mexican trafficking organizations to create their own distribution networks in the United States and within Mexico, eventually eclipsing the Colombians’ influence. Over the last two decades, these organizations have evolved into vertically integrated, multinational criminal groups. They are headquartered in Mexico, but they have distribution arms in over 200 cities throughout the United States — from Sacramento to Charlotte — and have established a presence in Guatemala and other Central American nations. Their major markets for cocaine are not just in the United States but also in Mexico itself and as far away as Europe. Although their primary business is cocaine and, more recently, methamphetamine, these groups also engage in other criminal activities, including human trafficking, kidnapping, and extortion.